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University Club of Montreal giving up its Percy Nobbs-designed downtown digs

Author of the article:

Susan Schwartz • Montreal Gazette

Publishing date:

December 22, 2017 • 4 minute read

University Club in Montreal, as seen from the main entrance on Mansfield St.Photo by Allen McInnis/ Montreal Gazette

The University Club of Montreal is selling its Mansfield St. clubhouse, a gracious limestone and brick building that has housed the private club since it was built in 1913 — six years after it was founded as a place for men with university degrees to gather. It was designed by Percy Erskine Nobbs, an influential architect trained in the Arts and Crafts movement and known for exquisitely crafted buildings designed on an intimate, human scale.

The clubhouse was classified by the Quebec government in 1986 as a historical monument, which means that the exterior as well as much of its interior is protected by the Loi sur le patrimoine culturel as a heritage space and no modifications can be made without approval by the ministry of culture and communications.

Membership in the club is stable at about 700, so that is not the issue. But money is. The building “requires major renovations,” according to a notice on the club’s website, and “the cost of maintaining it is just too high now,” club president Gabriel Zaurrini said this week.

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Members learned at a special meeting in mid-September that the clubhouse would be sold and the mandate for the sale has been given to the CBRE real-estate firm. Several letters of intent, which are not offers but preludes to offers, have been received.

“Interest is high,” Zaurrini said on Thursday.

It is hoped that a decision about a buyer will be made by the end of the first quarter of 2018.

Meanwhile, the clubhouse will close at the end of December; the art and the furnishings of value will go into storage. The club will relocate for 2018 to the Saint James Club on Union Ave. While no decisions about its eventual location are to be made before the building is sold, Zaurrini said options include buying a smaller place, renting or the possibility of merging with another private club.

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From a look at private clubs in North America that are thriving, the club’s leaders have gleaned some ideas about “ways to bring value to our club,” he said. One way might be to incorporate a business centre.

“A lot of members, older and not so old, do not have offices,” he said. “What we are looking at is a more adapted place.”

Times and mores have changed. The heyday of the private club has passed. Fewer people linger over lunch these days or afternoon bridge or billiards the way they did in the club’s earlier days.

Nobbs, a native of Edinburgh, was 28 when he came to Montreal in 1903 as director of the McGill University School of Architecture. Most private clubs of the day were formal spaces, observed architect Derek Drummond, a former director of McGill’s school himself, in a 2007 history of the University Club. In choosing Nobbs to design the clubhouse, members “were virtually assured of a more relaxed ambience than was to be found in the other clubs. Nobbs had a reputation for designing unpretentious, yet exquisitely crafted, buildings.”

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Features he incorporated into the clubhouse include a glorious curved staircase, fireplaces featuring finely detailed design, university shields on the stained-glass windows and on the ceiling of the first-floor university room — Nobbs loved heraldry and designed the McGill coat of arms — and two stained-glass windows in the stairwell in remembrance of those who served in the Great War. Nobbs also designed some of the lighting fixtures and furniture, including comfortable wooden chairs and two dozen brass-topped tables, no two exactly alike. Art, most of it Canadian, serves to burnish the patina and atmosphere of the clubhouse. It’s a congenial place with a wonderful atmosphere, as one longtime member put it.

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“It’s quiet, restful and interestingly decorated — the idea of a place like home but not home. ”

Among his better-known Montreal commissions were several McGill buildings and the Drummond Medical Building. Nobbs was also an artist and an artisan and skilled designer of everything from decorative plasterwork to stained glass. And he was an accomplished athlete who represented Canada in fencing at the 1908 Olympics — and an expert fisherman.

“He was a man of extraordinary talents,” said Montreal architect Julia Gersovitz.

The clubhouse was designed on the principle of an English club — as a well-designed sequence of experiences from the low ceiling and relative darkness of the entry hall, “giving the members not only a room in which to wait for others but also a chance to adjust to the light and ambience of the clubhouse,” as Drummond wrote, to the more generous proportions, higher ceilings and brightness of the rooms on the upper floors.

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There have been modifications over the years — in terms of space and also membership. It began as a men’s club, for one. In the early 1920s, a “ladies’ annex” was added to the main building. Women, however, were restricted to the ladies’ dining room — “penned in,” as Gersovitz put it — unless they were with a member, and were admitted as members only in 1988. Jews were admitted in the 1960s. In 1973, the requirement for a university degree was dropped.